Some Frequently Asked Questions

What is Benefits Assurance?

The term Benefits Assurance was coined [Note 1]  to describe new ways of coping with the uncertainty inherent in e-change projects.  The focus of Benefits Assurance is the delivery of a beneficial outcome acceptable to the organisation’s stakeholders whilst explicitly acknowledging the need to accommodate and control the intrinsic risks that the project involves.

Benefits Assurance recognises that benefits and risk are flip-sides of the same change coin.  Understanding the type of change being conceived by the project is therefore fundamental to getting a grip on the inherent uncertainty and constructing a project process that allows it to be managed pro-actively.

Benefits Assurance can be seen as an analogue of Quality Assurance.  Just as the latter is about creating a project environment that can assure that the deliverables of the project are produced as specified and planned, so then should Benefits Assurance be about creating the environment that can assure the delivery of the business benefits of the project. Quality Assurance is a whole lifecycle concept and, by analogy, we argue that this applies also to Benefits Assurance.

Benefits Assurance is a project management process that complements the more traditional forms of project management planning, monitoring and control.   The Benefits Assurance process supports the full lifecycle of a project from conception through planning, execution and monitoring to implementation and review.  It consists of a set of activities supported by techniques that extend the traditional project manager’s ‘toolkit’ and is essentially a tool for project control.

Standard project management theory and practice tends to emphasise the activities of a programme at the expense of its purpose.  Benefits Assurance provides a counter-balance by providing the means to maintain a focus on the goal of benefits realisation throughout the project.

Where did Benefits Assurance come from?

Benefits Assurance arose from the series of projects which formed the Cranfield Information Systems Research Centre’s ‘Benefits from IT-enabled Change’ stream of research.  It is deeply embedded in the tradition of Benefits Management [Note 2].

Refer to our ‘Fundamentals of Benefits Assurance‘ post for a discussion of the key sources that have stimulated out thinking. The reports, papers and articles that we have written ourselves can be found on our PUBLICATIONS site.

The need for new thinking about the management of e-change projects emerged from discussions with the Cranfield Information Systems Research Centre’s sponsoring membership that highlighted a somewhat negative view of ‘risk management’ when handled by ‘traditional’ approaches to the subject.  A research project was carried out during 2002-3 with the aim of developing an approach for dealing with the intrinsic uncertainties of e-change such that it contributed in a positive and pro-active manner to the realisation of the planned benefits from e-change projects.

Roger and Andrew Davies led this research project and reported their findings in a Cranfield Information Systems Research Centre Research Report (which can be found on our PUBLICATIONS site).  We subsequently left Cranfield to continue to apply and further develop the Benefits Assurance approach through our consultancy, research and training assignments at e-change Training Limited.

Why is Benefits Assurance needed?

There is a clear need to be able to deal effectively with the uncertainty inherent in e-change projects in order to:

Of course, not all projects involve the same degree of business change and the consequential levels of uncertainty. If we consider this in terms of the Applications Portfolio [Note 3] , we have the following picture.

If senior managers wish to avoid the risk of IT deployment then one obvious strategy that can be discerned from this picture is simply not to undertake strategic projects and to adopt, where possible, industry-standard packages for ‘key operational’ and ‘support’ applications.

It has been argued that in the face of continued ‘failure’ to control the risk of IT deployment, senior managers in many organisations have adopted risk containment strategies such as ERP and/or outsourcing. It has been further argued that such risk containment strategies will lead to a ‘levelling’ of competitiveness in many industries leading ultimately to the need to compete only on price and operational efficiency.

Organisations that wish to avoid this scenario need to retain the ability to realise major benefits from change and to create ‘distinctive capabilities’ through the development and deployment of key resources, significant amongst which is IT. For such organisations not to undertake ‘strategic’ e-change projects is not an option.

The view is now widespread that change is unavoidable and that organisations – both private and public sector – have to be able to manage it in order to:

Cranfield Information Systems Research Centre’s ‘Benefits from IT-enabled Change’ stream of research has shown that demonstrable improvement can be achieved if new thinking is adopted and has provided powerful new frameworks and techniques. Early phases of this research placed a particular emphasis on the elicitation and demonstration of benefits during the business case preparation stage of projects.

Practical experience showed, however, that there is a tendency for this good thinking to be set-aside during the frenetic activity of project delivery. Benefits Assurance has added to our knowledge by showing how to maintain a focus on benefits realisation throughout the whole project lifecycle, and especially where changes to the project environment, context or scope introduce new uncertainties.

What are the benefits of the Benefits Assurance approach?

Benefits Assurance provides practical, ‘how-to’ knowledge to help e-change project management teams maintain a focus on benefits realisation in the face of uncertainty throughout the complete lifecycle of e-change projects. Further, it addresses the contextual factors that need to be addressed if an organisation is to increase its competence in exploiting the potential of IT.

Taking a stakeholder perspective, it enables the following benefits:

• Their business peers understand and recognize the uncertainty inherent in bringing about strategic, e-change so that they will be willing and able to participate in a necessary and appropriate way.
• Their staff have the individual competence to manage e-change projects effectively to ensure benefits realisation.

How does it fit with the e-change Framework?

Benefits Assurance is essentially a tool for project control.  Standard project management theory and practice tends to emphasise the activity of a project at the expense of its purpose.  Benefits Assurance provides a counter-balance by providing the means to maintain a focus on the goal of benefits realisation throughout the project.

Many unsuccessful programmes have ‘failed’ because they have lost sight of their overall purpose.  The aim of Benefits Assurance is to provide a framework and tool-kit to prevent that happening.

Benefits Assurance requires that the purpose of the project is clearly defined in terms of the organisational outcomes and stakeholder benefits that must be achieved if it is to be said that the project has been successful.  It then provides the means to:

• account to the ‘owners’ of the investment in value-for-money terms.
• review actual vs. anticipated benefits realisation as a basis for organisational learning.

Benefits Assurance is not a methodology in its own right but an end-to-end control stream within the whole project lifecycle, as represented by the IT & Change Framework.  The activities listed above can be clearly discerned within the phases and stages of the IT & Change Framework.